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Email marketing is an effective tool for keeping your active customers updated with your current offers. It is also a great way for reaching out to new potential customers and convincing them that your business has something great to offer. But you can only reap the full benefits of an email marketing campaign if you avoid the blunders discussed in this article.
Many “experts” argue that email marketing is dead as a tool for generating business growth, but there are even more experts who believe it is a tool that is still as effective as ever as long as it’s properly executed.
A number of upcoming businesses as well as long-standing ones are still benefiting from the power of email marketing. But email marketing campaigns that actually yield great reward are only those that have been properly planned out and implemented with the right elements.
When properly planned and executed, effective email marketing is a profitable route that small or large businesses can use to reach more potential customers and spread their business to new markets. But to make sure your email marketing strategy is solid and capable of converting new customers while keeping you firmly in the consciousness of your existing customers, you must avoid these common errors.
Failing to Automate
If you are old fashioned and like to personally stay on top of things all the time, that’s fine. But when it comes to certain business processes, automation is the key to effectiveness and exponential growth.
Instead of personally controlling your email marketing, you can set it up to be automated and free yourself to focus on other aspects of your business.
Aside from freed resources and less stress, below are more benefits to be enjoyed from automated email marketing:
- Email marketing automation can help increase revenue.
- Automation creates an avenue to generate better leads as well as to better nurture leads.
- If properly executed, automated email marketing can effectively decrease lead conversion time.
- It can reduce marketing costs.
- Email marketing makes it possible to effectively assess, modify, and optimize your emailing strategy for better results.
- Automation greatly reduces the risk of human error in an email campaign.
- It facilitates the work process of your business’ sales team.
- It also facilitates both offline and online marketing.
Rather than ignore the benefits of an automated email strategy, you can enjoy these highlighted benefits as well as an increase in repeat business and referrals.
Failing to Properly Build Your Database
An email marketing campaign isn’t going anywhere if you don’t have the right list of people to email. You should make a priority of effectively building up your contact database with a reliable cloud backup.
You can begin this by first compiling the email contacts you already have before working on gaining fresh ones that can generating profitable leads.
You can expand on your current list of email contacts by importing contacts from your personal and business social media pages. You can also get more people for your database by providing an email newsletter signup field on your website or by providing a call-to-action button that directs your visitors to perform the action you want, such as subscribe.
While expanding your email database is important, you should be careful how you get your contacts. For example, avoid paying for an email list. If you purchase an email list, chances are the people you reach on that list have no idea about your business and as far as they are concerned, you are simply spamming them. This can create a bad reputation for your brand which is something you should avoid.
For an effective email campaign, your database should consist of active and potential customers who really have an interest in what you have to offer. By reaching only contacts who are interested in the contents of your email, you have a higher chance of gaining customer referrals from your campaign as well as generating leads. For example, if your business is targeting people in the US, there’s no reason why people in India should be receiving your emails unless they deliberately signed up for it.
Executing an Email Marketing Strategy without a Real Plan
By having a well laid out plan for your email marketing campaign, you stand a better chance of delivering the right information to the right target audience at the most opportune moment.
For example, an online clothing store with a well-planned campaign will start advertising best deals on winter clothing a bit before and during winter. On the other hand, a business that has failed to plan a campaign will probably send emails offering summer clothing at the beginning of winter.
Your email marketing plan should contain details such as an ideal calendar for your outgoing messages (how often emails should be sent), how many emails and what sort of email topics should be focused on, which group of targeted customers should be focused on, and much more.
Email marketing planning is most effective when current and near future events are taken into consideration so you can take full advantage of them to appeal to the interest of readers. For example, by thinking of an upcoming major sporting event, you can craft an email campaign that capitalizes on it to get customers excited.
Unprofessional-Looking Emails
A poorly written and unprofessional-looking email can actually do more damage to your business than sending no emails. A tacky email that’s loaded with typos, grammatical errors, irrelevant and low quality images, no useful information, and so on can lead to losing customers at a record rate.
People are highly suspicious of the content of their inboxes especially if the received content is clearly a marketing message. Your email needs to assuage such worries and turn a receiver’s mind-set from skepticism to enthusiasm, and this is best accomplished if your email raises no red flags. Crafting well-written emails that are visually appealing and contain believable content helps achieve that goal.
Not Putting Enough Effort into Crafting Email Content
Email content isn’t quite like most other online content, but the important thing to keep in mind is the shorter the content is, the better. An ideal email length can be anywhere between 200 and 300 words, and make sure to get to the point as quick as possible.
The email has to be easy to read and catch the attention of the reader within the first line (second line at most). So, take more time to think up content that will actually be worth the time of your targeted audience. Make sure the content goes through multiple reads, so you’re absolutely sure it is error-free.
If you didn’t give yourself adequate time to craft a compelling and flowing email, you could find yourself in a difficult situation of rushing to meet a deadline. This puts you at the risk of churning out whatever you can as fast as possible and paying little attention to content quality. Don’t forget that a poorly written email could cause more damage than no email.
Unattractive or Suspicious Subject Lines
An email subject like “fix all your financial problems by clicking here” might raise an eyebrow or two, but internet users who have been burnt by spam in the past will probably sidestep such a message.
Most email recipients are either motivated or dissuaded to open an email based simply on what the subject line reads. To inspire a positive reaction from a recipient, don’t make the subject sound even the least bit spammy. Make sure it has a conversational, personal touch to it in a way that is most likely to register with the receiver. Creativity is also important especially if you want your email subject to shine above other emails from competing businesses.
The quality of your subject line content is also important, especially when the email is being sent to a recipient who doesn’t recognize your brand. Emails from unknown sources are likely to be deleted without a second thought, so make the subject line heading attractive enough to get the recipient to read further.
Not Taking Advantage of Analytics
Metrics and analytics are important to help you evaluate the effectiveness of your email campaign. By paying attention to analytics, not only will you be able to tell which of your emails are being opened, you’ll also know which are actually generating leads. This information will guide you on what aspects of your email strategy needs to be re-evaluated for better success and which need to be dropped altogether.
So rather than sending emails blindly at the risk of annoying those on your email list and having them unsubscribe, pay attention to your analytics and let the data provided guide you towards proper email marketing strategizing.
Sticking with the Wrong List
Email spam score and bounce rate, if high, can be an indicator that your emails are being sent to people who don’t care about what you have to offer. This could mean that the people on your email contact list are not part of the market your goods and services are meant for and implies you need to refocus your email campaign on the right audience. You can also scrutinize your list and remove the recipients that don’t actually belong there while keeping the viable ones.
All of these highlighted common blunders in email marketing can easily handicap your marketing campaign as well as the success of your business. To better position your business for success, re-evaluate your email strategy to eliminate or significantly minimize the chances of making or repeating these errors.
